Review: Woody Allen's 'Midnight in Paris'

Woody Allen follows his 2010 London film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger with another European jaunt: the romantic comedy Midnight in Paris. Its opening shots are reminiscent of those of Manhattan; Instead of shots of Central Park and skyscrapers, though, the director presents a tightly edited montage of touristy Parisian scenes: street cafes, Montmartre, booksellers along the Seine and a glittering Eiffel Tower.

The film follows the perambulations of Paris visitor Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), a Pasadena-born Hollywood hack who is dissatisfied with the smoggy city. But he's tied to his Bridezilla-to-be, Inez (Rachel McAdams), a woman determined to move to Malibu.

Like Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, who bemoans car-centric Los Angeles, Gil Pender is a walker.  On a midnight stroll, he steps back in time with a little help from the Lost Generation, the collection of writers and artists–Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein (portrayed here by a maternal Kathy Bates), Djuna Barnes, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali–who made Paris their home in the 1920s.

Wilson, as the director's surrogate character, presents the best iteration of the Allen persona since Will Ferrell's turn in Melinda and Melinda; his proffering of a twenty-first century Valium to Zelda Fitzgerald (Alison Pill) as she teeters on the edge of the Seine is pure Allen.

The sepia-toned scenes in Stein's literary salon and Bricktop's nightclub are infused with a nostalgia that's at the core of the movie. The Hollywood-weary Pender longs for a golden age, a time where writers were writers, not screenwriting pens for hire. But Allen slowly reveals that the age Pender seeks is chimerical–even the author of the Great Gatsby had an unsatisfactory stint in Tinseltown. (On a side note, Bricktop's no stranger to the movies, either, having played herself in Allen's 1983 mockumentary, Zelig.)

While Allen's trotted out some of the characters seen here once too often (the dull American friends you avoid at home but bump into abroad were last seen in Vicki Cristina Barcelona), this is still his best film in years. With Midnight in Paris, Allen offers up his cautionary tale of the pitfalls of nostalgia with comical precision.

Dir: Woody Allen. 2011. 100 minutes. PG-13. Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Kurt Fuller, Mimi Kennedy, Michael Sheen, Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates, Alison Pill, Carla Bruni.

, 15301 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, CA 91403. For showtimes, click here.